Over the last couple weeks Epicurious has released a series of short animated videos called The Answer Is Cooking. Each has highlighted some environmental problem and suggested a solution in the form of a sort of kitchen hack—something you can do at home that will benefit the environment, whether it's using less water or shrinking your carbon footprint. For instance:

Cooking uses water—why not boil your pasta with less than the usual amount, or even right in its sauce? (Seriously: you don't need that much water for pasta.)

Food waste, of all things, is a driver of climate change—why not find a way to eat those kale stems rather than throw them out?

Electricity usage also leads to climate change—why not broil, rather than roast, to cut your energy usage by 60 percent?

All together, the series makes a case for what could be called sustainable home cooking. What, though, is sustainable home cooking—and as an individual action, can it possibly matter? The answer is yes. But it also depends on where you're looking.

There's not a whole lot of study explicitly tying what goes on in the home kitchen to, say, greenhouse gas emissions, and so in part a notion of sustainable home cooking will have to rely on some immeasurable idea of accumulation: if enough people go meatless on Mondays, for instance, that's bound to have some downstream effect. (Almost 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions come from the production of meat, dairy, and eggs.)

"Every time you make a food decision, you're having an impact on the food system," says Gabrielle Blavatsky, a research and policy analyst at the sustainability-advocacy organization Grace Communications Foundation. She points to two areas in particular where consumer decisions weigh heavily. One of these isn't even in the kitchen—sustainable home cooking starts, she says, at the grocery store.

"The way food is produced is the biggest determinant of what type of impact it's having on the environment," Blavatsky says. Bringing a lot of meat into your kitchen necessarily reduces how sustainable it is. "If you're a person who is cooking with a ton of meat every single day, it doesn't matter how sustainable your cooking practices are—you're going to have a much bigger environmental impact and a bigger carbon footprint than somebody who's cooking with significantly less meat in their diet."

It's not just what goes into the kitchen, moreover, but what goes out: two-thirds of food waste in the United States is produced at the home level (rather than the retail level) and is enormously consequential for the environment. Because of how much food is thrown out and how it breaks down in landfills into potent methane gas, if (worldwide) food waste were a country it'd be the globe's third-largest greenhouse gas emitter, after the U.S. and China.

The way food is produced is the biggest determinant of what type of impact it's having on the environment.

So in Blavatsky's view the two most important actions home cooks can take are shopping responsibly—buying local when possible, limiting meat consumption—and "making sure you're only buying what you're going to use, trying to eliminate what's leftover, and using your leftovers."

In short: make a plan and be thoughtful.

In this regard consumers can take a cue from restaurants, which—as Blavatsky points out—are "really good at reducing costs," and prone to seeing wasted food as wasted money. "I think a lot of home cooks could learn from what chefs are doing in the kitchen to make their practice at home more sustainable," says Blavatsky, who went to culinary school and recently wrote an article about what she learned there about reducing waste.

(We've taken some restaurant cues around here, too—my colleague Katherine Sacks, for instance, ate out one night and got a great idea for how to use kale stems, a tough part of the vegetable that's often tossed out.)

More broadly, food advocates like Mark Bittman have made the case that the simple act of home cooking is itself a social good and a sustainable practice. As a turn away from highly processed foods, it has the potential to improve health; if people can be persuaded to eat less meat, that has the potential to benefit their health and the health of the planet. As Bittman wrote last year, "The junk-food and animal-heavy Standard American Diet (you might call it SAD) wreaks havoc on our bodies, on the environment (it's a major contributor to climate change, among other things), and on the creatures we raise for nuggets, dollar cheeseburgers, and baconators." For Bittman, the answer to all that is cooking. We happen to agree.